Album Review: Mdou Moctar- Funeral for Justice

The several John Lee Hooker performances I attended in the 1980s seem like delirious dreams at this late date. The blues master put me in trances at the most mesmerizing of those club shows. The aggressive boogie of Funeral for Justice, the new album by Mdou Moctar, recalls that halcyon era. The surface elements may be dramatically different, but the boogie at the core of the sound of Hooker and Moctar is essentially the same. Just as my pals and I once relished getting “shook with the Hook,” my life is now enlivened by being “delivered by Doctor Moctar.”